Posted
by
BeauHDon Friday May 04, 2018 @06:00AM
from the flight-of-imagination dept.

Chinese company EHang has broken the Guinness World Record for the most drones flown simultaneously, despite them failing to coordinate for a light show. The company programmed a fleet of 1,374 drones to fly in set patterns, "but failed to spell out the date and the record-setting number of drones," reports the BBC. From the report: The South China Morning Post called the event an "epic fail." The record was previously held by U.S. technology company Intel, which flew 1,218 aircraft at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games in February. Intel's show was pre-recorded before being aired during the opening ceremony, due to "possible freezing weather and strong winds." According to the South China Morning Post, EHang was paid 10.5 million yuan ($1.65 million) for the Labor Day performance in the north-western city of Xi'an. You can watch a video of the drone display here.

"The South China Morning Post called the event an "epic fail.""
And promptly had their social scores plummeting into the negatives....?

Well, SCMP is in Hong Kong so it's a little different because...
1) What happens or is said in Hong Kong (mostly) stays in Hong Kong.
2) Hong Kong still has some autonomy and I haven't yet read about the social scores idea being used there - yet.
3) SCMP is in English, so its target audience is actually mostly foreigners or locals with really good English skills.

I'd imagine that one person with a signal jammer could take down a bunch of these drones at once if they needed to. If you did that suddenly while they were changing formation, they would probably get confused and crash into each other.

What this article calls "drones" are RC quadcopters. As the article mentioned, they were flown from by the ground, by radio, just like the RC planes that starting gaining popularity 80 years ago. Quadcopters are fun toys. Because of some fundamental physics, quadcopters get dramatically less efficient as they get larger. The concept works quite well for a toy three inches across. Efficiency drops as you approach the larger popular size, which is 250mm (10 inches) across. Once you get up to about a meter across you're hitting the practical limit. You CAN build one bigger, but it's performance and especially flight time completely sucks compared to a plane or helicopter of similar size. You're never going to put thousands of pounds of military equipment and weapons systems on a quadcopter; it just doesn't make sense.

Can a military use small, unmanned aircraft effectively? Absolutely, and that's been US military doctrine for most of the time since cruise missiles were developed in the 1970s, and especially since the Tomahawk in 1983. Several proposed new aircraft have been cancelled in favor of missiles, which can carry out the same mission at lower cost, in dollars and lives. The venerable B-52 can quickly carry TWENTY AGM-86 cruise missiles to within 1500 miles of the targets, anywhere in the world, and those missiles then autonomously fly the last 1,500 miles to their targets.

There's really little military need for small, low-performance aircraft to fly around in patterns. Generally, you want to get to the target and destroy it quickly. That's what missiles do. Other aircraft can loiter maintaining situational awareness, watching, then call the missile strikes. There's little need for the recon aircraft to also be the one to strike the target.

In some hostile airspace, against moving targets or targets you can't get good satellite views of, you sometimes want to look, then fire a weapon. For that you want fast, stealthy aircraft which carry enough armament to destroy the target in one strike. A large group of slow, non-stealthy toys, which carry no more than a hand grenade, isn't particularly useful.

The thrust developed by a prop at a given RPM is proportional to its diameter to the 2/3 power, multiplied by its pitch. In other words, the cube root of the diameter squared. As an easy example let's use a prop of diameter 1, pitch 1, and a prop of diameter 10, pitch 10.

1 squared is 1, and the cube root is 1, pitch is 1, so the thrust is 1 unit.10 squared is 100, the cube root is 4.6, pitch is 10.So a prop 10 times as big produces 46 times the power.

Are co-ordinated drone displays the 'new fireworks'? Fireworks are cool, but they're not 100% predictable, and they're noisy/smokey etc. I wonder though as this technology develops, and as 'heavy' drones become cheaper and more plentiful, if we'll see more of these sorts of displays for big annual events around the world?

Well, that depends where you live - where I live there are pretty strict laws about (permanent) illuminated structures - I realise these will drop through that particular loophole for a while, but I doubt it would be for long.

Both of which is a significant portion of the charm. Each of which have been used to create shows in their own right (fireworks that are used just for synchronised sounds, and fireworks which give off different coloured smoke for use in the daytime).

I know I'd much rather listen to noisy fireworks than 1218 drones. I know I'd much rather listen to noisy fireworks than 1218 drones. Sentence used twice for the two different definitions of "drone".

I noticed that toohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]But even if they bungled up somewhere, the end result still looks pretty cool. The main emphasis shouldn't be on 'bungled'. Too much propagandishness to me.

They use western names for talking with westerners and its a good thing they do, Chinese names just don't work for non-Chinese, nobody can remember the damn things. And if they write them the way they are meant to be written - with Chinese characters, well forget about it. I work with Chinese a lot, it's a really good thing that most have sense to choose an additional western name for themselves. The rest... well they end up getting called by some variant of "hey you" because for the life of me I just can't

There are two versions, one the company released and a composition of recordings from the crowd SCMP released. You could say there is a bit of a disparity there. Almost as if company doctored it's footage, quite a bit.

The link shows a lot of things, vid in SCMP article shows quite a few different things. Someone is using artistic interpretation on how it actually played out.
https://youtu.be/YQK6_2Brnqk?t... [youtu.be]

Last summer our "drone" (quadcopter) group in Dallas set the record for the most flown individually, as opposed to Intel's system in which a computer flew them all as a group. We have a hundred people standing in a field, all flying our toys simultaneously.

I wish the marketers hadn't labeled RC quadcopters "drones" because it creates confusion. An actual drone flies autonomously. Most drones are fixed-wing aircraft, airplanes. That includes the MQ-1B Predator, RQ-7B Shadow, MQ-9 Reaper, etc. What this artic

RC quadcopters are just like the RC model planes your great-grandfather flew eighty years ago...

So, you're saying that in 1938, people were flying radio-controlled model aircraft? I doubt it. There were no transistors until much later, so I don't think that the aircraft would be powerful enough to lift the HUGE BATTERIES, TRANSFORMERS, and VACUUM TUBES unless it was a FULL-SIZE aircraft.

Because the Bebop 2 now includes a GPS module, it is able follow step-by-step instructions given by the pilot, such as "fly 50 feet, turn left, then fly 30 feet". In US military terms, that's partial autonomy.

Full autonomous would include decision-making ability. A fully autonomous system can recognize it is on a collision course with another aircraft, and take appropriate action.

Partial or semi-autonomous is cool, it's fun - and you have to be standing there watching it, controller in hand, or it'll likely

So by your definition a paper airplane and a party balloon are drones?

In my opinion, any useful definition of "drone" needs to distinguish between a paper airplane vs X-47B, Triton, BAMS, etc.

The FAA doesn't use the term drone, so there is no definition from them. The use Unmanned Aerial System and "autonomous". Under the the first draft of the recent UAS regulations, a paper airplane was a UAS and required a license. The draft was slightly improved before it went into effect.